Amazon S3 Copy API Ready for Testing

A few weeks ago we asked our developer community for feedback on a proposed Copy feature for Amazon S3. The feedback was both voluminous and helpful to us as we finalized our plans and designed our implementation.

This feature is now available for beta use; you can find full documentation here (be sure to follow the links to the detailed information on the use of this feature via SOAP and REST). Copy requests are billed at the same rate as PUT requests: $.01 for 1000 in the US, and $.012 for 1000 in Europe.

In addition to the obvious use for this feature — creating a new S3 object from an existing one — you can also use it to rename an object within a bucket or to move an object to a new bucket. You can also update the metadata for an object by copying it to itself while supplying new metadata.

Still on the drawing board is support for copying between US and Europe, and a possible conditional copy feature. Both of these items surfaced as a result of developer feedback.

Tool and library support for this new feature is already starting to appear; read more about that in this discussion board thread.